Edith Nesbit, born August 19, 1858, in London, was the youngest of four children, and was only three when her father died. Her widowed mother tried for a time to manage the agricultural college of which he had been principal.

When Nesbit was eight, however, her mother moved to Europe, and for the next five years Nesbit was enrolled in a series of continental schools which she hated. Her only happy memories from this period were of her brief stay with a family in Brittany who had a daughter her age. When her family returned to England, she lived for a time in a country house in Kent, but her mother's financial difficulties forced them to move back to London.

When Nesbit was twenty, she met Hubert Bland, a bank clerk, whom she married a year later. The Blands hosted a literary and intellectual group who...